Religious symbolism is significant even in the human interactions of the dance. Men often symbolize phallic, aggressive supernatural beings and rain-bringing deities, whereas women symbolize actual fertility. In Iroquois ceremonies, women represent the Three Life-Giving Sisters—i.e., the spirits of corn (maize), beans, and squash, with no mimetic representation. Similarly, Pueblo women promote plant and human fertility by their symbolic dancing.

With no mimetic elements, the basket dance of the Tewa Pueblo rites includes invocations for plant growth and for the transmission of the gift of human life. The ceremony symbolizes the woman’s central role in sustaining the life of the pueblo.

In the animal realm there are also separate roles for men and women. Ottawa and Ho-Chunk women imitate the winged flight of wild swans and geese, whereas the Iroquois and Pueblo men represent eagles. Both men and women join in the mime of supernatural bears and buffalo in ceremonies of the latter tribes, more realistically in Iroquois dances. In the Southwest, especially in the New Mexican pueblos, male representations of supernatural deer show gradations of stylization ranging from the naturalistic portrayals in Taos Pueblo to the semistylization in Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Cochiti, and San Felipe pueblos, in which sticks replace forepaws, to the abstract upright deer dancers of San Juan Pueblo and masked, unreal deer in the kachina (katsina) dance of the Hopi. The solo deer dancer of the Arizona and Sonora (Mexico) Yaqui, always a man, is relatively realistic, with mime of the hunt and killing.

On the whole, in both Americas, agricultural dances tend to be abstract, and animal dances are usually decidedly mimetic. The animal maskers of British Columbia are terrifying portrayals of supernatural beings. In Venezuela, masked beasts of the former Maipure puberty dance, mauari, threatened a pubescent girl and her cortege and had to be subdued magically.

Here and there the human-deity relationship is expressed in hand gestures. The Kwakiutl of northwest North America evolved codified ceremonial sign languages, as did the Pueblos, Aztecs, and Maya. In San Juan Pueblo of New Mexico, the appearance of the rain gods is heralded by two ceremonial clowns using traditional gestures. Looking for the rain gods in the clouds, one of the clowns claps ashes from his hands, representing a cloud. He looks upward, shading his eyes to indicate his attempt to see into the distance. This gesture is always used whenever the clown speaks of what he “sees.” The clowns repeat this action toward the four points of the compass, continuing to see the approaching rain gods, who bring with them the rain cloud. Similar performers may appear in the pueblo’s plaza, outside the kiva. Dancing, unmasked clowns enact motions of luring rain, of sowing seeds, of digging, and of gathering the plants as they rise from the ground. Clowns also appear in the men’s spring dances and in the summer corn dances. After their entrance with a large group of male and female dancers, the corn dance singers station themselves in an arc near the drummers. They fit gestures to tunes and texts that are composed for each occasion but follow a traditional pattern and trend of ideas, beckoning to the rain gods in their cloud homes in the north, west, south, and east.

Invocations to the directions survive among the peoples originally from the Great Plains and Great Lakes areas, especially in the pipe dance. A solitary man offers a pipe to the thunderbird in the east, south, west, and north, moving clockwise, then to the deities of the sky and earth. Similar invocations to the directions survive in Mesoamerica as fragments of the rich gestural symbolism of the Aztecs and Maya. There, as in New Mexico, counterclockwise patterns emphasize the cardinal points.

Patterns and body movement

This religious, nature-oriented concept of space differs from that of Western folk and art dance, which has only geometrical or emotional significance. The geometric ground plans, however, show similarities with Western practices. The circling dances are sunwise in areas of former hunting people and countersunwise, or widdershins, among agriculturalists. Serpentine line dances also prevail among agriculturalists, notably among the Iroquois, Pueblo, Mesoamerican, and Andean peoples. Among the Iroquois, many round dances are open, with a leader, coincidentally resembling dances of the Balkans of southeastern Europe.

Aboriginal line dances are quite simple, whether they are single file or double file. Spanish influences are apparent, however, in the elaborations used in the double-file dances of the Southwest and Latin America. Spanish and Austrian influences probably inspired the couple dances of Latin America, for aboriginal dances juxtapose male and female partners only rarely, and never in overt courtship mime.

Characteristic of Indian dancers is a slightly forward-tilted posture, forward raising of the knee, flat-footed stamp or toe-heel action, and tendencies toward muscular relaxation and restraint in gesture. This basic style of body movement varies not only from area to area or from tribe to tribe but also from dance to dance and even from one individual to another. The agricultural dances generally are performed with an upright posture and an easy manner. Male war dances may include complex gyrations and flexion of the torso, as do animal dances. Vision and clown dances may induce bodily distortion.

Throughout the Americas, the posture varies with sex. Women tend to be more erect than men, to lift their feet and knees less, and in general to perform in a more restrained manner. Except for the war dances, women use the same steps as men, within the stylistic restrictions. In the woodlands of eastern North America, everyone proceeds with the stomp step, a flat-footed trot. In the Pueblo area, where men and women use a similar step, the dancers also specialize in a foot lift and solid stamp. In certain dances, especially clown, animal, and war dances and in some social round dances, individuals often invent variants of the basic steps. Sometimes the innovators borrow American ballroom steps such as those of the Charleston, though they adapt them to their own styles. The steps and formations of the Indian dance, as well as the overall structure of a dance or ceremony, follow the music closely. This connection is covered in more detail in Native American music.

Foreign influences

Among the influences from the Old World, the dances of northern Europe and the Euro-American dances have found little acceptance. The longhouse Iroquois reject all Euro-American dances. Among the few influences are some Oklahoma jazzlike, war-dance steps, an Indian two-step danced by couples, a waltz in a Pueblo social dance, and a number of couple dances of Latin America.

Iberia, on the other hand, has not only loaned some steps but has metamorphosed the dances of Mesoamerica and western South America to Argentina. These hybrid dances reveal every conceivable shade of stylistic adjustment.

Adaptations of mazurka, waltz, and other European dance steps occur in some ritual dances as well as in such secular couple dances as the Mexican jarabes. The European origin, reinforced by the Europeanized music, is obvious despite the subdued manner of performance. The most significant dances are the religious dance-dramas taken over from such medieval religious productions as moros y cristianos (“Moors and Christians”) and the matachina dances—both for trained male societies.

African American influences on Indian dance are scattered—the huapango couple dances of Vera Cruz, Mex., the Carnival dances of the Garifuna (Black Caribs) in Belize, the tamborito of Panama, and couple dances of coastal Colombia. Except for the Indian-influenced candomblé de caboclo, a ritual of the Candomblé sect (a variant of the Vodou cult), the religious dances of Brazil contain only African and Portuguese elements. Such popular Latin American ballroom dances as the samba of Brazil contain no Indian elements.